A novel 4D printing technique has been discovered by the Researchers at the Advanced Science Research Center at The Graduate Center, CUNY (CUNY ASRC), and Northwestern University that’s capable of constructing patterned surfaces that reconstruct the complexity of cell surfaces.
To create exactly designed nanopatterned surfaces decorated with delicate organic or biological molecules, this innovative technology allows scientists to mix organic chemistry, surface science, and nanolithography.
These nanopatterned surfaces will be used in drug research, biosensor development, and advanced optics, and moreover, this technology can create surfaces with various materials and these materials can be patterned across the surface with inexpensive photomasks. It’s not much a tedious cleanroom process even.
The printing technique called ‘Polymer Brush Hypersurface Photolithography’ combines microfluidics, organic photochemistry, and advanced nanolithography to create a mask-free printer capable of preparing multiplexed arrays of delicate organic and biological matter.
The novel system overcomes several limitations present in other biomaterial printing techniques. This allows researchers to create 4D objects with exact structured matter and tailored chemical composition at every voxel – a capability the authors refer to as ‘hypersurface lithography’.
The researchers printed polymer brush patternsutilising exact doses of light to control the polymer height at each pixel. To increase system speed, decrease pixels dimensions, and develop new chemistries for increasing the scope of materials that can be patterned; they had even planned to prolong the development of this novel printing platform.
Presently, they are utilising the patterns created by this platform to understand the subtle interactions that dictate recognition in biological systems.
